tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-193666942009-11-22T10:35:11.290-08:00MobosplashJohn Nicholas, a web developer in Dallas TX. I specialize in Content Mangement Systems and Flash Applications.John Nicholashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08650842047595053312noreply@blogger.comBlogger47125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19366694.post-49716025741483353072008-08-26T13:38:00.000-07:002008-08-26T14:21:04.749-07:00Flash Media Server Uptime MonitoringI recently needed to implement a way to monitor Flash Media Server for Load Balancing purposes. FMS traffic can be load balanced easily but in this case we wanted to have it stop sending traffic to an FMS server that was down. We've had a couple of times where FMS servers have run out of memory and stopped responding.The load balancer we are was set up to look John Nicholashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08650842047595053312noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19366694.post-55482695600273126982008-06-17T08:30:00.000-07:002008-06-26T14:48:39.372-07:00I've started a new job at Ackerman McQueen as Director of Interactive Technology. While Ackerman McQueen is primarily an ad agency, they also build a lot of Rich Media Sites and that will be my focus. Going forward expect to a lot more articles on Flex and Flash and a shift away from the content management space. CMSs will still be a big part of what I do but I think there will more interesting John Nicholashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08650842047595053312noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19366694.post-86990703685850487382008-04-08T11:37:00.000-07:002008-04-08T11:40:13.148-07:00Last year Amazon shook up the web development world with EC2, the first Elastic Computing Cloud. Later the addition of S3 for storage and SimpleDB for data fleshed out their platform as a real alternative for web application development. Now Google has launched AppEngine, a virtualized application hosting system that combines some of the features of all the Amazon services for a new take on the John Nicholashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08650842047595053312noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19366694.post-22801613885286956682008-02-09T07:44:00.001-08:002008-02-09T08:27:21.389-08:00Over the last month I've been looking very closely at competing open source content management systems. Typo3 is my goto CMS due to its power and flexibility but no tool can be perfect for every task and Typo3 does have issues with end-user friendliness.The main ones I've checked out so far are Drupal and Joomla. Both have large communities, local user groups and development books. This post willJohn Nicholashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08650842047595053312noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19366694.post-9873161233697858292007-12-22T15:32:00.000-08:002007-12-22T15:48:27.343-08:00When the Eclipse PDT project went 1.0 I started experimenting with using it as a PHP development environment and I think I'm ready to commit to it as my standard development environment.The other piece of the equation is moving to a local php/mysql setup. I'm used to having a development linux box and stuck with that for a while to avoid subtle issues moving work from my local mac to a live linuxJohn Nicholashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08650842047595053312noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19366694.post-19687098461437401162007-12-07T06:36:00.001-08:002007-12-07T06:56:21.974-08:00Yahoo and the Front End Developer.I've been a big fan of Yahoo's developer site (http://developer.yahoo.com/) Beyond their excellent javascript library, they also have lots of good video content ranging from deep javascript tips to advice on developing for screen readers. It's really interesting to see how important front end technologies have become again. I started out as a front end developer John Nicholashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08650842047595053312noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19366694.post-69663722934011222082007-11-28T07:44:00.000-08:002007-11-28T08:30:28.941-08:00Went to a Joomla User Group yesterday to check it out. I've been aware of Joomla for a while as a leading open source PHP CMS but haven't had a chance to see how it compares with Typo3 or other CMSs I'm familiar with. I thought the user group would be a good chance to get a quick overview.My first impression was that the interface was friendlier and more modern looking than Typo3's but as I saw John Nicholashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08650842047595053312noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19366694.post-57267222043104313962007-11-02T07:34:00.000-07:002007-11-02T07:50:49.980-07:00A lot of people feel like the ASP.NET Postback model is awkward and hard to work with. If you've also been using non-.NET frameworks like Rails or CakePHP then you are probably even more frustrated with it. The closest option so far has been Castle, which appears to be a nice framework but for many MS oriented shops is too big of a leap, not just politically but because of its almost complete John Nicholashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08650842047595053312noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19366694.post-80562842030513737272007-10-19T06:45:00.000-07:002007-10-19T06:52:19.216-07:00Actionscript 3 FrameworksSaw an interesting overview of the current Flex/AS3 framework scene at https://admin.adobe.acrobat.com/_a200985228/p12266504/. This is a Connect presentation by a couple of Flex experts, the developers of ASUnit, who looked through all the open source AS3 Frameworks they can find and give their opinions on them. I've been using the ARP AS2 framework on a couple of large John Nicholashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08650842047595053312noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19366694.post-75550615220765919232007-09-19T07:10:00.000-07:002007-09-19T07:30:23.896-07:00PDT IDE and Netbeans IDE updated.Good week for IDEs. PDT, the eclipse based PHP IDE and Netbeans both have major releases.PDT is one the leading PHP IDEs and the closest to an "official" open source PHP IDE project, having the support of Zend and other major players. There are several other PHP IDEs including other eclipse options but I believe PDT will become the dominate one if it isn't alreadyJohn Nicholashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08650842047595053312noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19366694.post-68132134341132555732007-09-17T05:59:00.000-07:002007-09-17T06:30:41.246-07:00JQuery 1.2 (and 1.2.1!)A little late blogging this but I haven't even had a chance to play with it yet. JQuery 1.2 is finally out with several big changes. XPath selectors have been moved into a separate plugin. CSS style selectors are really the more natural way to work in JQuery anyway and the plugin gives backwards compatibility if you need it, so a good move I think. There are a lot of new John Nicholashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08650842047595053312noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19366694.post-13598770658096798012007-09-01T10:00:00.000-07:002007-09-01T10:18:26.028-07:00Magento Commerce first beta.The first beta of Magento Commerce was released on August 31st. Varien, an Los Angeles ecommerce shop has been teasing the PHP world for months about this project and it's great to see it finally released. Despite the large number of open-source PHP CMSs, there has not been that many options for ecommerce. OsCommerce is the biggest but has a reputation for being John Nicholashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08650842047595053312noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19366694.post-5704844167639779992007-08-25T06:02:00.000-07:002007-08-25T06:23:38.978-07:00New jQuery Release.jQuery 1.1.4 has been released. Check out the blog post for the full details. The highlights are that it is easier use alongside other JS libraries and improved selector speed. The first is very useful for when you want to use jQuery for you main library and then still easily use something like a sciptaculous/prototype slide show on a site. There's also a new .slice() method John Nicholashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08650842047595053312noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19366694.post-54783676272286305842007-08-01T07:42:00.000-07:002007-08-01T08:22:51.778-07:00The Yahoo! User Interface Library Updated.Yahoo has released an update to their excellent javascript library with several new components and a lot of bug fixes. The YUI Library covers the gamut of javascript from ajax support to widgets like calendars and datagrids. My usual tool of choice is jQuery, the leanest, fastest javascript library but when I need a deep feature set I look to Yahoo's kit.John Nicholashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08650842047595053312noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19366694.post-89356016603773262012007-07-21T07:45:00.001-07:002007-07-21T08:09:44.575-07:00WebORB for AIR.In my last post I talked a bit about the new WebORB for AIR that Mark Pillar showed at the Dallas stop of the Adobe onAir Tour. I mentioned that I wasn't sure of a reason for using it when SQLite was already available. Pillar left a comment clarifying that for me. I've been in CMS mode for a while and had gotten used to thinking of databases too generically. Obviously a lot of app John Nicholashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08650842047595053312noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19366694.post-76277562803713595492007-07-19T08:05:00.001-07:002007-07-19T09:21:32.848-07:00Adobe Air Tour. Went to the Dallas stop of the Adobe onAIR Bus tour. A pretty good event and I definitely learned some things about AIR I didn't know yet. I see a lot of uses for it and think it is a good fit with the web apps that we are already planning.Mark Pillar of Midnight Coders did a demo of WebORB that impressed me. I am already a user of WebORB on several projects but I had not seem John Nicholashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08650842047595053312noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19366694.post-80899006431443463312007-07-09T20:01:00.000-07:002007-07-09T20:15:25.295-07:00DbVisualizer 6.0 Released.Minq Software has released a new version of their excellent DbVisualizer. This is a java based tool for working with databases. It can connect to any database with a java driver and works great on Mac, Windows or Linux. There's a free version and a pay version ($149) that adds a lot more features. I've been a big fan and user for years now.The new version has several John Nicholashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08650842047595053312noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19366694.post-70926798187164390172007-07-06T11:56:00.000-07:002007-07-06T14:33:41.292-07:00WebORB for PHP v 2.0 Released.Midnight Coders have released an update to their excellent Flash Remoting product, WebORB for PHP. I'm using the earlier 1.3 version in production now and am looking forward to working with the new version. 2.0 adds much of the management features from the .NET version and code generation for the client side connection code, including Flex, ARP and Cairngorm output. John Nicholashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08650842047595053312noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19366694.post-84646849577003391422007-07-04T07:55:00.001-07:002007-07-04T08:01:22.628-07:00New version of Xray Flash Debugger.A new version of Xray is out. Xray is an open-source flash debugging tool that lets you see and change variables in a running flash movie. The new version completely revamps the logging pane. Now it has much better performance and a better interface with search, highlighting and filtering.I've found this tool to be invaluable in working on the large flash video John Nicholashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08650842047595053312noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19366694.post-65227551233796794862007-07-02T10:30:00.000-07:002007-07-02T10:50:07.161-07:00Zend Framework Released.There's been a lot of interest in php frameworks recently and now Zend, the guys who actually maintain php have released their take, Zend Framework. There are a few different approaches to frameworks but they can be divided into two camps. First are full frameworks like symfony or CakePHP. These have also been called 'opinionated' in that they have strong expectations for John Nicholashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08650842047595053312noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19366694.post-13208022028353125742007-05-05T10:05:00.000-07:002007-05-05T10:43:00.437-07:00Obligatory Silverlight OpinionWith Silverlight's introduction, all the flash guys have been talking about it and opinions range wildly from Flash-killer to DOA. I think either extreme is pretty unlikely. Adobe has a lot of traction with agencies and development shops and they aren't going to change tools on a whim. These kind of decisions aren't made on a feature-list checkbox basis or buzz.The John Nicholashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08650842047595053312noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19366694.post-76345845905964167262007-03-26T05:52:00.000-07:002007-03-26T06:12:42.875-07:00Dallas Typo3 CommunityI've been using the Typo3 CMS for a few years now but didn't know of any other local developers using it despite the large international Typo3 community. I'd talked to at least one local agency that was toying with it for future development but ended up backing away from using it. Ad agencies seem to have a harder time seeing the benefits of CMSs. Their sites tend to be John Nicholashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08650842047595053312noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19366694.post-43848611737530203582007-02-27T08:58:00.000-08:002007-02-27T09:22:34.856-08:00Flash on the command lineI've been doing a lot of small flash projects over the last few months. I've been using Actionscript 2.0 for all of them and making it a point to work using a good object oriented approach. Right now I'm starting a very large scale project so I decided to adopt an existing Flash framework and decided to use ARP. This decision led to a pretty major rework of my whole FlashJohn Nicholashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08650842047595053312noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19366694.post-1165415604443126142006-12-06T05:48:00.000-08:002006-12-06T07:18:25.296-08:00Microsoft's WPF/E Released for Windows and MacMicrosoft has released their new "Windows Presentation Foundation Everywere" beta plug-ins for Windows and Mac. Currently this is awkwardly shortented to WPF/E but this is just a codename and will be replaced soon. WPF/E is basically a graphic runtime to provide capabilities similar to Flash but with a MS centric approach to development. Most Flash John Nicholashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08650842047595053312noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19366694.post-1165330809268814752006-12-05T06:34:00.000-08:002006-12-05T07:00:09.310-08:00Better CSS for ASP.NET 2.0 controlsASP.NET controls have a weird tendency to write a lot of old fashioned HTML and Visual Studio tends to encourage styling on a control basis. The new Expression tools are better about making CSS style layouts so hopefully that will come to Visual Studio. Until then, here are some Control Adapters to help some of the messier controls. The updated controls include John Nicholashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08650842047595053312noreply@blogger.com0